This year will, as everyone hopes, be the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s last season without a music director — at least for another five years. Andris Nelsons has been signed up, and although he’s conducting only two BSO subscription programs this entire year, he’ll be really and officially taking charge next fall. His photo is already on the cover of the BSO program book, with the title “Music Director Designate.” For his first Symphony Hall concert since he was appointed, the press was invited to a rehearsal and press conference, which the Boston Globe featured on the front page (unfortunately, having a day job, I couldn’t attend), and the concerts were the season’s first to be sold out. The Globe apparently wanted to give Jeremy Eichler a little more space than he gets for his usual overnight BSO reviews, so the most newsworthy review of the season didn’t actually appear until it turned up in the G-section a day later. (Couldn’t the Globe make a little more room in the next day’s paper?)

Nelsons’s concerts (October 17-19) began with a static Siegfried Idyll. If Wagner intended this as a lullaby for his infant Siegfried, this would have been the perfect performance to put him to sleep. A quality that has disappointed me in a number of Nelson’s performances is that his slow movements have so little of the kind of phrasing that moves the music forward. Tension, along with the listener’s attention, droops. The strings sounded sumptuous. Nelsons arranged the instruments, unlike James Levine and most of this season’s other guest conductors, without separating the first and second violins antiphonally (the traditional 18th- and 19th-century seating place), but — like Erich Leinsdorf (if my memory hasn’t failed me) and unlike Seiji Ozawa — with the cellos opposite the violins and in front of the violas. This makes for a warm but more thickly textured string sound, so the impulse to lean forward into the flow of the music is all the more important.

Nelsons followed the Wagner with Mozart’s large scale Piano Concerto in C, No. 25, with the superb British pianist Paul Lewis making his Symphony Hall debut (he’d played Mozart’s 23rd Piano Concerto with Christoph von Dohnányi at Tanglewood in 2012 and gave a powerful Celebrity Series recital of Schubert’s last three sonatas earlier this year at Jordan Hall). But this time he was less effective, less urgent, less nuanced in his phrasing. This concerto is one of Mozart’s grandest and most outgoing, so if nuance goes, the very qualities that make this piece most interesting and compelling get lost. Lewis’s playing was fleet and glittering yet brittle, and once again, the conducting, however energetic, seemed rhythmically stiff-backed.

A few weeks ago, at the Discovery Ensemble’s first concert of the season, music director Courtney Lewis made the daring decision actually to begin the program with a Mozart Piano Concerto (the D minor, the one foreshadowing Don Giovanni, in a lightning-bolt performance, with young Israeli pianist Shai Wosner). I wish there had been something more daring to celebrate the incoming music director’s unique interests and qualities, even something a little less ordinary than the order of the pieces on the program.

Nelsons also had the odd habit of conducting with only his right hand, while frequently leaning against the guard rail with his left hand. Did the concussion that made him cancel last summer’s Verdi Requiem at Tanglewood make him afraid of losing his balance? I don’t remember seeing him do this before.

Andris Nelsons conducts the BSO. Photo: Marco Borggreve.

The significant success of this concert came after intermission: Brahms’s Third Symphony. Nelsons’s most successful Tanglewood performance in 2012 was his Brahms Second, but I thought this Third was better — the best live performance I’ve yet heard from him. This was not exactly a thoughtful interpretation — Nelsons doesn’t seem that kind of conductor — but here everything was working. The BSO brasses and winds were in top form (John Ferrillo’s tender oboe at the end of the second movement, James Somerville sounding that haunting horn call opening the third). The melancholy third movement dance — a kind of eerie tango — had that forward-leaning quality, that yearning, that tension between propulsion and reluctance missing in the previous pieces. This was the first time I’ve heard Nelsons in person that he seemed to be really inside the music. And the warm standing ovation he received for the Brahms matched the standing ovation welcoming him at the beginning of the concert, only this time it was not just for something he was but for something he had actually accomplished.

The most controversial concert of the BSO season turned out to be the first. After a gala, Pops-style opening night, the BSO returned to serious business with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 conducted by the venerable and now frequent guest conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose approach was to almost italicize the way Mahler shoehorned the contrasting pieces of this gigantic autobiographical puzzle into a single work. I liked it, especially the sardonic Scherzo, which orchestrates without including the words to Mahler’s satirical song about St. Anthony’s preaching to the fishes (they listen seriously then completely ignore the sermon), with Dohnányi characterizing the variety of fishy responses. Full-voiced British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly sang the famous “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”) with honest, unshowy earnestness. In the smaller vocal role, Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling chirped prettily, though with a bit of an edge and less affect (my discerning friends thought she was better than that). The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, singing the 18th-century German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s poem “Resurrection” (which gives this symphony its nickname) from memory, nearly stole the show with its warmth, accuracy, and passion.

By far the best concert of the fall season was the one led by composer Thomas Adès, his third visit to the BSO as guest conductor. No one’s programs since the departure of James Levine have been more thoughtful or surprising — or narratively coherent. In 2011, for example, he led excerpts from his own opera and works by other composers all based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This time the program was mainly about voyaging. First to the Hebrides Islands off the coast of Scotland in an exhilarating performance of Mendelssohn’s inspired “Fingal’s Cave” Overture. Then around New England, in a spectacular performance (the BSO’s first) of Charles Ives’s Orchestra Set No. 2, with its multiple layerings of personal and cultural memories: what Ives biographer Jan Swafford calls the “time-suspending,” “dreamlike,” and “mesmerizing” “An Elegy for Our Forefathers;” then the “virtually cubist” evocations of both hymns and ragtime in “The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting;” and ending with the achingly complex response to the sinking of the Lusitania in “From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose.” Adès’s own “Polaris,” Voyage for Orchestra(2010), took us into outer space. Gorgeous, yet tonally more conservative than the Ives, with its exotic array of marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, bells and chimes, piano and celesta, and two harps, in which musical themes whirl out from a mysterious center and five small brass ensembles in both balconies add to the expanding spaciousness and consciousness.

I attended the opening Thursday night concert (October 10). At the Friday evening “UnderScore” concert, the Adès was accompanied by a screening of Israeli-born video artist Tal Rosner’s projection of images of seashore, human figures, and abstract animation. The YouTube clip didn’t make me sorry to miss it, especially since the abbreviated Friday concert left out Adès’s conducting an intense, revelatory version of the familiar César Frank D minor Symphony — mysterious, slashing, emphasizing contrasts in textures, giving fresh life to connecting passages overlooked by most conductors, and featuring Robert Sheena’s memorable English horn solo in the slow movement. In an angry letter to the Globe, a BSO patron complained about being short-changed by the Friday program.

On Sunday, the BSO Chamber Players celebrated the beginning of their 50th season, with the multi-threat Adès playing harpsichord in his early “Sonata da caccia” (1993) inspired by Couperin and Debussy, with oboe (John Ferrillo) and horn (James Sommerville) — the instruments for a chamber piece Debussy never lived to complete. Adès closed the program playing piano in his later (2000) Quintet, with violinists Haldan Martinson and Elita Kang, violist Mark Berger, and principal cellist Jules Eskin. He was also the superb pianist for Ravel’s Chansons madécasses (“Madagascan Songs”), in the afternoon’s most stunning performance, with Eskin, flutist Elizabeth Rowe, and a most impressive young baritone named John Brancy (in what is usually a woman’s role) singing Ravel’s three songs, the middle one startlingly interrupting the languorous sexuality with a violent outcry against imperialism.

Except for Adès, the playing was uneven. Rowe, violist Cathy Basrak, and harpist Jessica Zhou gave a skillful rendition of Debussy’s late Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, but left out all the insinuation, the perfume that brings this unusual piece to sensual life. Adès’s own pieces probably needed more rehearsal. About halfway through the single movement of the sonically complex Quintet he actually started conducting from the keyboard.

An earlier BSO guest conductor, Stéphane Denève (October 3-8), once paired with Nelsons as a possible BSO music director, led the first BSO performance of Prokofiev’s complete orchestral suite from his opera Love for Three Oranges since Serge Koussevitzky played the American premiere with the BSO in 1926 (its familiar March has been repeated numerous times). Cheeky and languid, it got a dazzlingly exhibitionistic performance, and the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto had Yo-Yo Ma contributing his deep humanity. Denève ended with a competent but uninspired Strauss Ein Heldenleben (which the BSO program translated as “A Heroic Life” rather than the more familiar “A Hero’s Life”) — Strauss’s extended piece of self-promotion that needs all the inspiration it can get. Concertmaster Malcolm Lowe received an especially warm reception for his big violin solo depicting Strauss’s wife Pauline, his first major solo since returning to Symphony Hall after rotator cuff surgery.

And last week (October 24), British conductor Daniel Harding, a former Tanglewood conducting fellow and disciple of Simon Rattle, made his BSO debut leading the BSO debut of British composer Marc-Anthony Turnage’s Speranza, a BSO co-commission (Turnage is best known as the composer of the mod opera Anna Nicole, which was the last production, a popular and critical hit, of the now sadly defunct New York City Opera). A small audience welcomed the composer, but the piece in three elephantine slow movements interrupted by a livelier third movement sounded, on a first hearing, too much like heavy-handed 1940s movie music. The inclusion of the duduk, a plaintive Armenian wind instrument, and cimbalom, a Hungarian hammered dulcimer, added unusual coloration. Turnage apparently dropped an entire movement after this year’s London premiere (also led by Harding), but he probably should drop at least one of the slow movements as well.

The concert concluded with a bewilderingly flat attempt at Mahler’s sublime Song of the Earth, in which none of the parts seemed to add up. The singers were tight (almost strangulated) German-Canadian tenor Michael Schade (a particular victim of Harding’s inability to keep the orchestral volume down) and Dutch alto Christianne Stotijn, whose pleasant voice has too much spread and who had to resort to chest register for low notes.

Besides the BSO were some other strong orchestral concerts. At Emmanuel Music (September 28), director Ryan Turner led a strong and convincing performance of an irresistable piece that isn’t played often enough, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with violinists Heather Braun, cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer, and — especially — pianist Robert Levin making the solo parts not only sound like real chamber music but also sing. Some rarely-heard vocal ensembles preceded the Triple Concerto, but the performances lacked a necessary insouciance and charm.

Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic returned to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the first time in nearly two decades (a concert postponed from the Boston shutdown after the Marathon bombing). Zander has for many years been concerned — even obsessed — with Beethoven’s controversial metronome markings, which many musicians feel are unrealistically fast. But coming very close to those markings, yet somehow not focusing on them, this Ninth (I attended the last of three performances) had a fleet transparency that was immediately infectious, gripping, and finally quite moving. The orchestra and the Chorus Pro Musica were both superb and polished. The proto-Mahlerian awakening had an edge-of-the-seat suspensefulness. The second movement gallop was an exciting juggernaut. The third movement Adagio (“cantabile”) was like a floating — indeed, sailing — lullaby, with a single, unstoppable pulse. Beloved Boston baritone Robert Honeysucker was outstanding among the four vocal soloists for both the size of his voice and his power of declamation (it’s he who announces the switch in tone to the Ode to Joy). Soprano Michelle Johnson hit a solid climactic B-flat. Tenor Yegishe Manucharyan seemed to have the wrong voice for this heroic part. And I couldn’t hear mezzo-soprano Sarah Heltzel at all.

The evening began with Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. Zander made the most of its dramatic pauses and wholehearted emotion. High praise to say that the Ninth Symphony lived up to this masterful prelude.

And to return to the Discovery Ensemble, Courtney Lewis’s accomplished young players stood out not only in the Mozart concerto, but in the mesmerizing Ligeti Melodien (“Melodies”), with its uncanny, unearthly textures, through which snippets of melody kept trying to break through. The program ended with a rich-sounding performance of Sibelius’s oddest symphony, his Sixth, with its numerous anti-climaxes. It was as if Lewis were still in the sound world of Ligeti, in which accompanying rhythmic figures were continuing to suppress the pastoral tunes attempting to reach the surface. Finally, this got a little frustrating, and I couldn’t erase my memories of Thomas Adès’s version with the BSO last year in which the tense balance between tune and texture was more completely realized.

Lloyd Schwartz, Senior Editor of Classical Music at New York Arts, is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a regular commentator on music and the arts for NPR’s Fresh Air. For 35 years, he was Classical Music Editor of the Boston Phoenix. He is the author of three poetry collections and the editor of three volumes by and about poet Elizabeth Bishop, including the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, and, most recently, The Best of the Best American Poetry. He’s a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his writing about music, and the recipient of a grant from the Amphion Foundation for his writing on contemporary music. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Dr. Schwartz’s writing also appears in our sister publication, The Berkshire Review for the Arts, especially in the summer, when he visits Tanglewood and other festivals in the Berkshires. Click here for a list of them.

Related

Related Posts

3 Comments

Martin CohnNovember 7, 2013 at 08:56

Regarding Nelsons’s Brahms 3rd (heard on Friday afternoon), we also found the
playing to be gorgeous, but the pacing frequently static. Nelsons’s ritards were
often molto rather than poco, as written. It’s odd to disagree with Dr. Schwartz
on this because in his comments he so often emphasizes thrust and continuity.

Lloyd SchwartzNovember 7, 2013 at 10:37

One of the odd things about Nelsons is that he’s not very consistent (the BSO spin is that he’s very “spontaneous”). So it doesn’t surprise me that on a different day, the Brahms may have changed–for better or worse.

Martin CohnNovember 7, 2013 at 20:03

Prof. Schwartz’s remark may be explained by Nelsons’s comment in his press
interview, that rehearsals nail things down so that we can improvise in performance
(to paraphrase.)

Support New York Arts. All donations are tax deductible through Fractured Atlas.

We can't bring you the reviews, articles, and interviews the arts deserve or our new program of interdisciplinary concerts, performances and exhibitions without your support. Please donate generously. The Arts Press (parent organization of New York Arts) is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Arts Press must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Please send contributions other than those made online, i.e. by check, to Michael Miller, Publisher, The Arts Press, 127 East 91st Street, New York New York, 10128. Checks should be made payable to Fractured Atlas, with The Arts Press in the memo line.

Hans Knappertsbusch was one of the most renowned Wagner conductors who ever lived. His recordings of Parsifal, especially, are near-legendary among confirmed Wagnerians. It was thus with some excitement that I opened a new 3-CD set from Orfeo, consisting of the first release ever of any performance of Lohengrin conducted by the conductor sometimes known […]

There have been dozens of capable, and more than capable, recordings of Lohengrin. Among the most-often praised are the Sawallisch/Bayreuth (1962), Kempe (1963), Solti (1985), and Abbado (1991). Recording a major Wagner opera involves heavy costs that a record company may be unable to recoup. Hence the appeal of recording a concert performance. This CD […]

I have been a fan of Kelly Galvin ever since her wonderful performance as Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons with Shakespeare and Company, years ago. The detail alone in Ms. Galvin's performance was stunning. Even more impressive now is her direction of Kate Hennig's The Last Wife, produced by WAM Theatre in Shakespeare and Company's Bernstein Theatre. The simple set […]

The late Donizetti masterpiece, L'assedio di Calais (The Siege of Calais) is a rarity indeed, even in Europe. Four years after the first performance, l’assedio was not performed again until 1990. One hundred and eighty-one years after its premiere in 1836, this Glimmerglass production marked the American premiere. During its composition, Donizetti had struggled with […]

Wordpress themes are rather like cars. They begin to look old, then parts nobody but the admin sees start to fail. One can refurbish them and update them until they stop working together. The Berkshire Review for the Arts has had the same theme since 2009. The company that built its foundations went out of […]

A tip for our readers: How to get the most out of New York Arts and The Berkshire Review for the Arts.

What if I hate reading on computer screens, even tablets?

We get occasional inquiries from readers about whether we plan to launch a print edition of our arts journals. The answer is that we've given it some thought, and we're still thinking about it.

It is not only our older readers who object to reading them online. There are even some millennials who would rather read from paper. One of our readers got the simple idea of using the sites as sophisticated tables of contents. She prints out each article on three-hole paper and files them in a loose-leaf album. I've devoted a lot of time to finding the very best print and pdf facility there is. Just click on one of the icons at the top right of the article and print!

Click here to make your tax-deductible donation to The Arts Press, publisher of New York Arts and The Berkshire Review. Or click on the notice in the sidebar. The Arts Press is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Arts Press must be made payable to“Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.